As a political decision, the policy President Bush announced on stem-cell research just two years ago was impressively deft. Antiabortion activists had insisted that experiments on cells derived from aborted or abandoned embryos were an outrage; many researchers--and several Republican Senators--countered that because the cells have the potential to turn into virtually any cell type, from kidney to bone to brain, they could be invaluable in curing disease. So Bush split the difference: henceforth no newly harvested embryonic stem cells could be studied with federal funds. But the 70 or so stem-cell lines already in researchers' hands were fair game. "This,"...
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